Clouding Around: Apple, Twitter And Amazon Web Services

At its annual AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon unveiled a smorgasbord of new products designed to poach legacy customers at rival companies like Oracle and IBM. One of the most notable is the new AWS Import/Export service, which Amazon says is “faster, cleaner, simpler, more efficient, and secure.” Moving petabytes of data is also easier, thanks to a new Snowball appliance that is robust enough to withstand a 6 G shock, the company said. In addition to the 47-pound tamper-resistant storage device, the Amazon Kinesis Firehose was also announced, making it easier to load streaming data into AWS. With Firehose, customers can create delivery streams and route them to Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets or Amazon propagation tables. It will then do all the monitoring, scaling, and data management, the company said.…